UK’s been cast aside and left red-faced by USA withdrawal

IT was the hawkish conviction of the neo-conservatives in Washington at the turn of the millennium that democracy was its own justification and should be exported by sheer force of American will to the darkest corners of our world.

You don’t need to be fluent in Mesopotamian Arabic to understand just where they had in mind.

This globalist philosophy of American dominance, held deeply by figures like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, informed the muscled foreign policy of the Bush administration in the post 9/11 world, though when the story of the War on Terror is recounted, this aspect is so often omitted.

The attack on 9/11 provided a small group of Washington warmongers the pretext required to embark on a crusade they had, by 2001, largely already envisioned.

Afghanistan was the palate cleanser. US intelligence agencies were soon instructed to turn their attentions to Iraq. We all know how that ended.

Now, as Taliban flags are flown from discarded US vehicles, many in the West are keen to entertain another mass delusion, based on another selective reading of history.

A consensus now emerges that our motives for waging this war were humanitarian in nature – not about riding side-car as America projected its power recklessly around the world.

The terror threat is real, and democracy is absolutely worth fighting for, but the United States has made the same interventionist errors repeatedly for more than half a century and the UK has been all-to-willing to play its humble affiliate.

Almost as many innocent Afghans perished in this conflict as did Taliban and other opposition fighters. Indeed, resistance to the Taliban from within

Afghanistan was in part undermined by the invasion.

We claim now that female liberation was a primary objective but have been happy to turn-the-other-cheek to our “friends” in Saudi Arabia for decades, which speaks to the contradictions in British rhetoric and the realty of our foreign policy which have arguably hastened our decline on the international stage.

While the progress in Afghan education must be noted, this achievement has also been overstated in recent days – most Afghan girls never attended school throughout the occupation and those who did often had to walk miles before being taught in unsanitary conditions.

At home, we are now transfixed as the misogynist extremists mount a surreal public relations campaign to rehabilitate their tarnished global brand – perhaps firmer evidence of the West’s cultural impact than the alleged liberation of women.

There is now talk of sanctions, of organising the international community with hopes of moderating the emerging theocratic nightmare. Some even speak of eventually recognising the Taliban’s legitimacy.

But if these options are on the table now, then why not sooner? Biden is correct that NATO’s continued presence was simply postponing the inevitable and admits that the chaos we are seeing was priced-in to his decision to rapidly withdraw.

The UK has been cast aside by the United States and left red-faced on the international stage. In every respect, the War on Terror has yielded diminishing returns for Britain. The only positive to come of this is that the unwieldy British national ego may finally have been whittled down to more appropriate size.

This overdue reality check should stir the necessary humility required to enter a new phase in British foreign policy. One where values are not just preached but practiced – and where “special relationships” run both ways.